John Milton — "When a man hath been labouring the hardest labour in the deep mines of knowledge…"
When a man hath been labouring the hardest labour in the deep mines of knowledge, hath furnished out his mind through the whole cyclopædia, hath read the choicest authors, ancient and modern, cannot be content with this, but that he must be made a divorce-court man, to be an usher of the court of justice, and to sit in the seat of judgment, to determine upon the matter of divorce, and to be a judge between husband and wife.
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English poet whose Paradise Lost (1667) is the canonical English epic, written while blind during the Restoration after his service to Cromwell's Commonwealth.
Closely associated with
Andrew Marvell (Commonwealth poet and friend who protected Milton at the Restoration).
For an intellectual contrast, see
King Charles II's Restoration court, the courtly, sexually-libertine, theater-reopened world of 1660s London — Milton wrote Paradise Lost as a defeated Republican; the Restoration culture around him celebrated everything his Commonwealth had banned. The cleanest 'losing side writes the masterpiece' moment in English literature — Paradise Lost's Satan is freighted with the political defeat of the regicides Milton served.
